Tuesday, 31 December 2013

Dose. How nice it looks, like the glow of a hearthside fire,
in which one sits in front of reading an MR James ghost story, secure
in the knowledge that such things do not exist though the beer in the glass is
corporeal and firm and believable; how snug and inviting the beer in the glass
looks, a glow and a warmth that lifts the soul even though the next stage of
your commitment to the beer is yet to come. Dose. As if in contrast to the soft
glow of the beer in the glass, the nose is an assertive sergeant-major, a firm
fruity (raspberry, but then you already knew that) toffee nose with a hint of
dried rucksack that leads—even in the middle of winter—you to think that Sumer
Is Icumen In; and then you taste it and think of the waft of ripe raspberries
smashed against the side of a sun-warmed wall (brick perhaps), more toffee
(strictly caramel this time), a creaminess that strokes the hand and a Robinson Crusoe sense of dryness in the
finish. The beer in the glass is a big wrap around the world in its sensuous,
fruity, malt-sweetness, and slightly sour group hug. Dose: this has been
Thornbridge and St Erik’s Imperial Raspberry Stout. Dose. The beer in this
glass has a darkness, a depth of darkness that you could drop a stone into and
never hear its impact on the ground, falling, falling, falling, falling through
space and time; but once you’ve got past the darkness and any feelings of
vertigo, the senses are lit up with a rainbow bridge of flavours and aromas, a
bridge that needs to be crossed. Dose: and then I think it has a Bruckner-like
sensibility, in that it brings together fudge-like caramel, luscious liquorice
and creamy coffee notes, and then there’s a piney-hoppiness, that hoves alongside
a big fat alcoholic musical motif that is symphonic in its intensity. It rises
and falls, here quiet, there robust in its challenge to the palate. A complete
beer, a beer that sends you off to bed with the expectations of the sort of
dreams that all of us wish for. Sweet dreams. Dose: this beer has been Sharp’sQuadrupel.

Saturday, 28 December 2013

A few weeks back I was asked by What’s Brewing in my capacity of Secretary of the British Guild of Beer Writers to write something about beer writing for their back page column Industry Insider. I noticed in the new issue that someone has written in a letter taking me to task for ‘bemoaning’ the lack of narrative books about beer , whilst forgetting The Longest Crawl by Ian Marchant. He’s right, I completely forgot about it. I read it several years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it, and whilst I’m on the forgetful trail, another excellent narrative book about beer (or maybe pubs), is The Search for the Perfect Pub by Robin Turner and Paul Moody. However, enough of the sackcloth and ashes, the reason for this post: if you missed it or don’t get What’s Brewing, here is it (this is the version I sent in and it had several cuts to make it fit, it’s only here because I cannot find the print version online, so this is not a case of poor subbed me).Writing about beer is the
best job in the world. Apparently. That’s a phrase I (along with colleagues in
the British Guild of Beer Writers) frequently hear, as if I spend all our time
propping up the bar or travelling from brewery to brewery or pub to pub.

Yes, there’s a great deal of
fun in beer writing and a fair amount of beer consumed (moderately of course).
I go to beer dinners, visit breweries in the UK, across Europe and the US;
occasionally brew myself; go to great pubs all over the place; judge beer and
receive beers in the post. What’s not to like? Oh and I get paid for it.

However, I can count on one
hand the UK beer writers who make a living from just writing about beer. I also
write about travel, occasionally turn my hand to freelance subbing and editing
and host beer dinners and talks. Yes, it’s not a bad job, but not the best
paid.

The majority of Guild members
either write about beer in their spare time (some are journalists in other
fields) or communicate about it as PRs, consultants, brewers or sommeliers.
We’ve even got a poet in our ranks (he’s also a part time King of Beer in
Derby), while a couple of playwrights have recently joined. Beer writing (or
should that be communicating?) is a broad church, all of whose members share a
powerful passion for beer.

Despite the financial
disincentive to write about beer, as the Guild’s Secretary, I continue to
receive requests to join, from both the UK and across the world. We also have
members in the US, Canada, Italy, the Low Countries, Austria and Greece — it
all makes for a healthy discourse.

Was there ever a golden age
of beer writing? Some might say that it could have been during the early 1990s
when Michael Jackson’s column in the Saturday Independent was the first thing I
turned to or when Roger Protz popped up regularly on the BBC Food Programme. Or
is now with books, blogs, apps and beer tastings going on all over the place?
I’m inclined to the latter.

The national newspapers, as
ever, are desultory in their beer coverage — a pub column here, a feature on
women in brewing/beer/whatever there. On the other hand, the regional
newspapers cover beer and pubs a lot more regularly, while trade publications
such as Publican’s Morning Advertiser, Host, Inapub and Pub & Bar provide a
healthy amount for work for Guild members.

On the magazine front, there
is of course CAMRA’s Beer, while Beers of the World, which was briefly
resurrected, is now online (the history of UK beer magazines is a fraught one
and needs a separate article). Let us not forget CAMRA newsletters — I spent
ten years editing Somerset CAMRA’s Pints of View and it was good fun.

On the book front, yes
there’s a liturgy of lists, whether 1001 Beers, 300 Beers, Craft Beer Worlds or
Yorkshire beers. However, there are also home brewing books plus gift-type
did-you-know-this-about-beer books and guidebooks.

For me, what is missing (and
this is a constant source of conversation between some beer writers) are more
narrative books about beer, something that tells a story, or undertakes a
journey. Apart from Pete Brown’s trilogy of Man Walks Into a Pub, Three Sheets
to the Wind and Hops & Glory, there is no real beery equivalent to Andrew
Jefford’s magnificent book about Islay whisky, Peat Smoke and Spirit (though
bloggers Boak & Bailey’s forthcoming Beer Britannia will be eagerly
awaited).

From my own experience,
publishers are unconvinced that beer narrative books will sell; maybe beer
writers have to do what Tony Hawkes did, take a fridge (full of beer perhaps)
around Ireland or something? It’s a shame because beer writing is crying out
for something that merges beer, history, travel and anecdotes along the likes
of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts or even Harry Pearson’s light-hearted
take on Belgium, A Tall Man in a Low Land.

Then there are the blogs:
seven or eight years after their emergence there is still a vibrant beer
blogging community out there, even if some complain that many consist of beer
tasting notes and ‘where I got drunk last night’. With my blog (maltworms.blogspot.com)
I enjoy the freedom to write about beer in a way that I cannot do when I have
been commissioned; it’s place where I can experiment and think aloud about beer
issues. Finally there is Twitter, where brief reviews, comments and links to
beer stories can be posted

As well as the up and down
nature of beer writing’s financial side, to me there’s also another issue beer
writers need to be aware of: independence. By the very nature of what we do,
beer writers are part of the industry (beer is sent to us, invitations are
issued to launches and dinners), but there is a need to be separate from the
industry. Beer writers should not be cheerleaders for every beer in the
universe, while some writers are better than others in covering the complex
issues of, say, the pub companies.

As for the future of beer
writing, I’m positive. It’s no good moaning about the lack of coverage in the
national press or the fact that a lot of beer books are list-orientated —
people who want to be beer writers have to think beyond the traditional ways.

The whole concept of beer
writing has changed in the last decade. I remember when Zak Avery, Beer Writer
of the Year in 2008, started doing his beer tastings straight to camera and
putting them out on Youtube. This was then a relatively new concept and at the
time I remember commenting that this was asymmetrical beer writing: Zak was
also writing articles, blogging as well as filming. It pays for a beer writer
to use several different approaches to communicate about beer. For me that is
beer writing’s future — a diversity of voices, methods and opinions letting the
world know about the rich universe of beer, breweries, pubs and the people who
make it all work.

Sunday, 22 December 2013

What’s best about best when it comes to beer and — if you
think about it — pubs? Is it the moment, the surroundings and the time in which
the moment occurred, the memory, the nostalgia, the feeling of being somewhere
beyond the ken of day to day life, the spontaneous, out-of-the-blue event that
can knock one sideways with its sense of chance; or is it the carefully
considered, pondered over, politically correct, look-at-me, pencil chewing
collection of choices spread out in front of one like a crowded table cloth?

I’ve made my living by working on books that celebrate the
lure of the list, so another list should be easy, but given that the aim of
this blog has always been to write outside the constricts of my working life,
this listing is harder than a list I have to write that puts money in the bank;
so there’s an inevitable laziness and fatness to its construction, an
indiscipline even, but also a joyous sense of letting loose, running across a
meadow like a dog after a rabbit. So let’s go. As the bloke at the bus stop
said: trap one, trap two.

Best UK Cask Beer

As much as I like hops and the joy that they bring to my
soul, I have also spent 2013 reminding myself that malt has a place in the
construction of beer, which is why the most memorable cask beer that leaps to
the forefront of my mind is Adnams Broadside, as sampled and glorified and
glowed over at the Anchor in Walberswick. I would also like to mention: Exe Valley’s Winter Glow at their pop up bar in Exeter, Fuller’s Black Cab in the
Mad Bishop & Bear and a pint of ESB in the Bear in Oxford, which was so
entire in the way it embraced all points of my sensory compass that I
remembered why I loved it. Oh yeah, Hook Norton’s Old Hooky continues to bring
forth both smiles and similes.

Best UK Keg Beer

Anything by Camden, but I really loved the collaboration
they did with Doug Odell earlier in the year, am too lazy to look up the name, but
it was very very gorgeous. How about a glass of Freedom Organic Dark? Yes
please. Or maybe, Partizan’s muscular Quad, the finale to a good night out, as
drank at the Jolly Butchers in Stoke Newington. And not forgetting Wild Beer’s
gorgeous cucumber beer, which I had in a pop up bar in Bath, on a hot summer’s
day.

Best UK Bottled or
Canned Beer

I think I’ve only had one UK canned beer and that was from
Camden, while on the bottle front I was bowled over by Ilkley’s ‘triple hopped
IPA’ The Chief, which as I wrote at the time it lifted up its leather-trousered,
boot-clad leg and got onto a Guzzi Cali and roared off along the highway. Buxton’s Axe Edge, Westerham’s Audit
Ale and a couple of beers from Siren, whose names I didn’t note also impressed.
Then Meantime’s Imperial Pils was an intriguing drop.

Best Overseas
Draught Beer

Easy. I was in a bar in Malaga, a craft beer bar, which on
the European mainland seem to becoming as ubiquitous as Irish bars were once
(see my thoughts on them in the Czech chapter in Three Sheets to the Wind), and
I ordered a glass of Dougall’s 942 Pale Ale, a fragrant (as in peach and orange
ripe skins frotting each other until the cows come home) beauty of a beer with
a weighty mouth feel and a dancing almost Sufi-like whirl of refreshment
through the whole of the gulp. And it’s from northern Spain. I also ended up in
Rimini twice this year on a couple of assignments and rather enjoyed Forst
Sixtus in a sort of sports bar. And while I remember I rather enjoyed the creamy
Schwarzbier at Hausbrauerei Eschenbrau in Berlin. Hold on a minute I’ve also
just recalled Brooklyn’s Soriachi Ace and Lagunitas IPA, more of them please as
well.

Best Overseas
Bottled or Canned Beer

In can I enjoyed Ska’s Modus Hoperandi while in
bottle I also continue in my reverence for Orval — I’m just about to start work
on a bottled beers book (another list!!) so that might easily change.

Best Collaboration
Brew

Is that between breweries or writers? With breweries I
enjoyed Moor and Arbor’s Dark Alliance, while Wild Beer’s decision to invite
Mark Tranter and Kelly Ryan over to produce Shnoodlepip also brought a smile to
my face. On the writers/breweries side I enjoyed Melissa Cole’s Siberia with
Ilkley and the various Brains continental beers; and in the spirit of Elisabeth
Schwarzkopf I would like to mention the India Pale Bock I did with Arbor.
Lovely beer, but then I’m not a brewer.

Best Overseas
Brewery

I thoroughly enjoyed my visit to Bellevaux in the Ardennes,
where a coachload of beer judges were met by locals holding flaming torches and
the village band; the beer, especially their Black, was good as well. Can’t
recall if I have visited any other overseas breweries apart from Bellevaux and
Val-Dieu this year. Oh and I enjoyed a couple of glasses in the brewpub U Tří růží in Prague earlier this year.

Best New Brewery
Opening 2013

It’s got to be Burning Sky, whose Saison à la Provision had
a leathery, lemony, bitter, orange, dry, bracing character while the large long
dry finish reminded me of one of those long endless runs that I seem to vaguely
remember on Ski Sunday. I drunk it with the ferocity of a wolf coming down on
the fold.

Pub/Bar of the
Year

My
local pubs the Bridge Inn and Woods never fail to satisfy me, good company and
good beer — what else do you want in life; but in my travels I have also had my
head turned by Hops & Glory in Islington, the Exmouth Arms just down the
road and the Three Horseshoes in Batcombe; but my favourite at the moment is
the Swan in Stratford St Mary, which is Mark Dorber’s second pub. It is
brilliant — an old school village pub with a new wave range of beers, including
Soriachi Ace, plus great food (pig cheek croquettes). And in the commodious
garden at the back there are hop poles with First Gold and Bodicea
growing.

Beer
Festival of the Year

Don’t seem to go to too many anymore, enjoyed the one at the
Bridge Inn in May, especially as it is a five minutes walk for me; I also
enjoyed the Birra del Anno event in Rimini.

Best Beer Book or
Magazine

Beer continues to impress, while I love All about Beer and
look forward to seeing what new (ish) editor John Holl has in store. Audacity
of Hops, Craft Beer World and the regular Brewery History Society quarterly
publications (if you are not a member then I would recommend joining them
immediately) also made my life more bearable.

Simon was the best, but my favourite tweeter these days is
Dai Llama, but that’s not beer.

Food and Beer
Pairing of the Year

Bit of self PR here, but I was very proud of the BritishGuild of Beer Writers dinner, where myself, Mitch Adams and Tim Hampson
arranged Camden US Hells with chilli jam brushed smoked salmon, Wild Beer Modus
Operandi with pheasant and a venison sausage roll and Partizan’s Quad with
stout ice cream and a salted caramel dessert. Try it at home and let me know
how you get on.

Friday, 20 December 2013

If you have the updated 1001 Beers book that came out in the autumn and are wondering what new beers went in here’s a handy little crib list — I’m not going to say what came out, readers will have to work that one out themselves, but these are the beers that went in and the writers were Zak Avery, Pete Brown, Greg Barbera, Martyn Cornell, Evan Rail, Joe Stange, Tim Hampson and myself.

Wednesday, 18 December 2013

Here comes a glass of beer, it might be dark, stygian in
its absence of light or as glossy as Black Beauty’s coat; it might be as deep
as the mines of Moria, mysterious and hiding all sorts of surprises. On the
other hand, it might be pale, bathed in sunlight like a smile from someone you
love, a crystalline brightness that brushes away the blues. Hold on though, it
might also be coppery, it might also be amber, it might even be chestnut brown
with crimson hues, a bomber of a brunette.

Here comes a glass of beer (or could it be a bottle), it
might be cheap, it might be affordable, luxuriously affordable, perhaps the
sort of price we pay for a decent bottle of wine, a chunk of cheese that has a
tang or a pliancy and a creaminess that love-bombs the mouth or a bite that
bites back. Or heavens above, shiver-me-timbers, they’re-all-at-it, vote-UKIP,
things-used-be-much-better-in-my-day, I-found-a-hipster-in-my-turn-ups,
destroy-all-beer, it might be expensive, beyond the pocket of most of us, it
might be making money for brewers, it might not be beer, it might use big
words, it might be honest in wanting people to pay more, it might offend all
sense and decency.

Let’s all go back to a simpler age: mild & bitter,
bitter & mild and the ladies in the lounge. Raincoats, trilbies, Lady
Chatterley’s Lover in brown paper, the paper the colour of the beer that spills
over the Formica table on which the crumbs of a dry, Joker-mouth-shaped
sandwich has sat upon prior to immersion in ill-fitting dentures. Let us then,
you and I, go back to a simpler age of cheap beer, consumer campaign coupons,
beer as beer, which after all it is, and cheap beer, one size fits all beer.
Let’s all go back, for beer is the past and we like it that way.

When I first met him 20 years ago I used to have rows with
my late father-in-law about wine. I used to say if I had the money I wouldn’t
have a problem in spending saying £50 or even £100 on a bottle of wine, while
he would say that no wine was worth that much. Perhaps it isn’t perhaps it is,
but it’s beer that I’m interested in, which is why an online piece in the
Guardian about expensive beers (and the predictable supporting hurrahs) got my
goat. Maybe there’s a market for expensive beers, maybe there isn’t, maybe it’s
a case of brewers dolling up ordinary beers in a fancy package and asking for
top dollar, maybe it isn’t, but what got my goat was that there was no solution
to the perceived problem, just an old moan. I spent £11.99 on Sunday for a
750ml bottle of Adnams Sole Bay Celebratory Ale at the brewery’s shop in
Southwold; was it worth it? I think so. I am glad that Adnams allow their head
brewer Fergus to muck about, to use champagne yeast and to even dress up the
beer a bit. I’ll age it and see what it says to me in the summer perhaps. I’m
also quite happy to spend £1 on Budvar’s session beer Pardál, as to be found in
Morrisons. It’s not the best beer in the world (being famously described by
Evan Rail as bear urine and talking of which the expensive/cheap beer argument
has a good analogy with Rail’s exemplary Why Beer Matters being released as a
limited edition book with a much higher price tag than the Kindle), but it’s a
cold one in the fridge that breaks the thirst come the witching hour. I’ll
spend £5 on a bottle of Schlenkerla’s Doppelbock and so on. I like the fact
that brewers tinker, mess about and see what happens when they do this or that.
There’s plenty of hairy-armed blue overalls beer about and plenty of bright
citrus-sponged beer about. That’s the great thing about now. Last year, as I
spoke with him for a piece on London brewing (see here), Fuller’s John Keeling told me
that this was a great time for brewing. I would suggest that this is also a
great time to be a beer drinker, all over the world, which is why the moaning
about expensive beers got my goat.

Or I suppose we could all go back to a time when beer was
just beer. Really? In my research at the National Brewing Library in Oxford
last week, I kept coming across accounts of all sorts of beers in the 1880s:
IPA, pale ale, bitter, barley wine, stock ale, black beer and of course lager.
I suspect some of those would have been more expensive than others and I bet
people coped then as they can now.

Thursday, 5 December 2013

Melancholic have I been of late, thoughtful even, not bad,
neither sad, but the consequence of the dark nights that now seem to fall
directly after lunch, while the need for words remains as urgent as ever (I
wanted to write the world. What went wrong?). And in this space, thoughts turn
lathe-like onto other thoughts, most notably on the blurry cloud of
beer-inclined speculation that exists out there in the ether — and one thought
keeps returning to me with the regularity of a healthy heartbeat, that there
currently exists a feverish nostalgia for yesteryear in beer and brewing. Next
year’s most eagerly awaited beer book will cover the history of British beer
from the 1960s; one of the most respected beer blogs is a mass of facts and
figures from the last two centuries of British brewing, while another equally
compelling blog corrects the myths and ghost stories that have plagued beer
history for decades; meanwhile retro beer labels have appeared on bottles and
cans from an assortment of family and global brewers and recipes from the past
are dug out, dusted down and presented to the contemporary drinker. Beer
festivals are not free from this strange yearning for the past — some of the
most acclaimed ones have called home spaces that once represented a long vanished
municipal pride. Perhaps hipsterism, the sickly runt of postmodernism, is also
part of this nostalgia.

So is this nostalgia a bad thing? Not really. Beer is
nostalgia: things ain’t what they were; you used to get a good pint in here
(sometimes with the phrase once upon a time added, which imbues the statement
with the quality of a fairy tale); it doesn’t taste like it used to (maybe
nothing tastes like it used to); in my day (which suggests that every day is an
endless collection of many days; there is no such thing as a day — Borges
posited that there had only been one man throughout history in a poem whose
name eludes me at the moment). The beer that sits eager and anticipatory in the
glass has the ability to take us back in our own personal time; bugger the
biscuit that Marcel Proust nibbled on and led him to spending years in bed
writing A la recherche du temps perdu, a glass of beer has the power to take the
drinker back time and time again, whether it’s to a pub, meal, meeting,
sporting moment or even just a moment of discovery. This is beer’s strength but
it is also the way that it cannot escape from nostalgia. Mind you, the future
is overrated, while being modern means nothing. I’ve seen breweries use phrases
along the lines of ‘Modern beer for modern people’, which is as meaningless as
pubs that have ‘bar & kitchen’ attached to their name; though no one has
yet used something like ‘yesteryear’s beer for people living in the past’. I
wonder why.

This is inspired by an essay I am working on at the moment that looks at memory and beer hence its rather inchoate nature

Saturday, 30 November 2013

This is part of the Boak & Bailey inspired Go Longeridea and was written in 2008Jesus turned water into wine, but Teo Musso at Le Baladin
has gone one step further — by changing beer into wine. At his bar in Piozzo, a
small village high up in the Piemontese hills above the Barolo wine country, he
proffers a glass of Xyauyu, a dark, almost black powerfully alcoholic ale
(13.5%) that has spent 18 months sitting outside in a container in the
courtyard at the brewery. Exposure to air has led to the beer going through a
period of oxidisation, which in most cases is sudden death to beer, but here
the process has alchemically altered the beer in the most sensational way — it
has gone through the valley of shadows and death and come out totally
transformed.

Viscous and limpid in the glass, it is warming and
sherry-like on the palate, complex and blessed with a restrained but
comfortable sweetness: an elegant and esoteric beer that has taken on the
character of wine. It is strong, 13.5% in strength, and the drink-by date on
the bottle says to be consumed by the end of the world. Clearly, Musso is a man
with his eyes firmly fixed on beery nirvana.

Even though wine is king in the country of Italy, craft beer
is taking pot shots at the throne, challenging the old hegemony, especially in
the style bars and brewpubs springing up in the north. Here in the beer
homelands of northern Europe we always think of Peroni and Moretti whenever the
subject of Italian beer crops up, inoffensive premium lagers with big
advertising budgets and nothing much to get worked up about. However, it is now
estimated that there are approximately 150 breweries and brewpubs in Italy, a
number that will probably keep growing. Le Baladin, which has been going since
1996, is often seen as the star of the show with Musso as its leading light.

He certainly has the aura of a man who believes his own
publicity (‘he is the Jim Morrison of beer,’ I am told by one Italian beer
writer). He is tall and rangy, draped in a long scarf, leather-jacketed, stick
thin, heavily stubbled and blessed with the sort of distressed, windswept hair
that must take forever to do in the morning. Even though he’s in his early 40s,
there’s a boyishness about him, an enthusiasm, a sense of adventure or
exploration, plus a easy charisma — he greets people in his bar with the
sureness of one of those infuriating people who seem to have limitless
self-confidence. When we meet he is still thoroughly amused over the battle he
had the previous day with a Carlsberg Quality Control Manager at a beer seminar
they were both talking at. Ask him about beer and the last thing you will hear
will be marketing double-speak.

The home of Le Baladin’s beery heaven is the bar of the same
name where the brewery first started. Nowadays, the beer is created (produced
doesn’t seem an appropriate word for what he does) in a stand-alone site across
the village square and down a side street. In May 2008, it will be all change
again as the current brewery will be solely for experimental beers, with the
regulars being created elsewhere in the village. For the moment then the
brewery remains an adventure in stainless steel, comfortably sited within a
nest of tiled walls and floor. 85% of his beers are bottled because he believes
that is the best way his beer can be presented, especially when it appears on
the beer list of smart restaurants.

Many hail him as a genius, though others of a more
conventional stripe might think some of Musso’s ideas as thoroughly bonkers.
For a start, most of the fermenting vessels have headphones attached to them.
This is due to Musso’s belief that as yeast is alive it can respond to music,
in the way newly born babies like a spot of Mozart. There is even a tango
guitarist who has composed movements for the different phases of fermentation.
Along with the regulation barley and hops, various spices, chocolate, coffee
beans and even myrrh go into the brewing pot, while top-fermenting yeasts are
joined by strains that usually work with whisky or wine.

Then there is Musso’s
latest creation, the Casa Baladin, which is a beer restaurant and hotel across
the square from the bar, a unique stronghold of beer cuisine and seven
luxuriant rooms all individually decorated to a theme. The Flowers Room is
dominated by an incredible three-metre deep brass bath that was brought from
North Africa; the Jewels Room is hip and minimalist, while the 70s one is lurid
and psychedelic. You get the picture (one of the other beer journalists I was with used the words ‘knocking shop’). There’s also a Turkish bath, while the
high-ceilinged lounge continues with this mixture of modern and fantasy: old
weathered beams hang over the proceedings, a metal chimney rising out through
the roof has the feel of something out of 1001 Arabian Nights, some of the
seating comes from an old Paris cinema. ‘I want to transmit experiences to
people,’ he says.

This is the sort of room that would be an ideal winter’s
night experience with a glass of the brewery’s chestnut-coloured Noel Baladin
to hand, a sensuous Christmas ale that has become so popular it is now
brewed all year. However, in keeping with Musso’s brewing contrariness, the
recipe is changed annually. The 2007 vintage that I try has coffee beans in the
mix, while 2006 saw chocolate being added. ‘Next year I don’t know what I will
do,’ he laughs. Noel is nutty and alcoholic on the nose, with a hint of vanilla
and ground coffee beans in the background. The palate relaxes with a rich and
rummy smoothness that is woken up with an appetising espresso-like bitterness.
Musso hands around a plate of truffles to accompany this glorious beer; they
have Noel within them. Never mind about chocolate liquors, beer is the new
confection accessory in town. ‘I like to challenge the way beer can be used
with chocolate.’

Challenging our perceptions of what beer is and can be is
what Musso is about. His Belgian-style witbier Isaac has a tart, sourish edge
to the palate; Elixir is an Abbey-style ale that is fermented with Scottish
distillers’ yeast, while Nora contains ginger root and myrrh and is hopped as
lightly as Italian brewing laws will allow — it’s weird in the
it’s-a-beer-Jim-but-not-as-we-know-it mode and absolutely delicious. The
Italian spirit of adventure and inspiration that drove the likes of Marco Polo
and Da Vinci are very much alive in Teo Musso. ‘Every week I think in my head a
new beer and every two months I try and brew one,’ he says. ‘A new taste is
like a new way of communicating with people. My beers try to communicate new
flavours and aromas to people. I never get bored with brewing. I am like a
volcano spewing out new ideas. I could never be a wine producer because there I
could only expect to be creative once a year, while in beer you can be creative
all the time.’

Tasting notes

Nora, 6.8% — dry, spicy and refreshing

Brune, 4.7% — chewy, smoky and creamy with toffee notes

Super Baladin, 8% — strong Belgian-style ale with a
candy-sugar sweetness on the palate; chewy, bittersweet and silky with lots of
malty flavours

Blonde, 4.9% — honeyed, tart and herbal

Isaac, 5% — delicate and subtle with hints of spice and a
quenching sourish edge

Nina, 6.8% — ESB style, which is quenching and chewy

Sei no 6, 5.2% — made with a special mineral water; dark
gold in colour, it has an estery, sour, gueuze-like nose, with lemony hints;
has spices and buckwheat in the mash and is fermented with a wine yeast.

Wayan, 5.8% — light and subtle with a gentle carbonation,
dryish; ‘I contaminate the beer with lacto-bacteria and then bottle and
secondary ferment’.

Elixir, 10% — sweetish, has a hint of Belgian triple about
it but not as hoppy; sharp and prickly in its carbonation; a dry and fiery
triple that doesn’t have the sweetness of the more common Belgian ones.

Erika, 9% — dark orange in colour, made with heather honey
and also has pine resin added to the boil; not overly sweet, has a nose that
can be compared with like being in a forest after a rain shower; rounded,
restrained bitterness, bittersweet dryness; very drinkable.

Tuesday, 19 November 2013

Morning has broken in the East Sussex village of Firle and
at the brewery Burning Sky the working day has began. The bells in the
flint-faced church opposite sound the hour and the muffled clang of metal casks
banging together beyond the wooden doors of the brewery entrance reach out as
if in friendly response. Brewer Mark Tranter looks at the clock as if to
confirm where he is at this stage of the day. It’s time to go to work.

Time, indeed. Time will be the fifth ingredient (or the
fifth element if you will) in the beers produced by Tranter’s new brewery
Burning Sky. Within the old barn with its brand new concrete floor, assemblage
of shiny stainless steel vessels and a boiler whose tuneless humming puts me in
mind of an elderly guy who’s a regular in my local, there is also a quartet of
2500-litre oak barrels. Two of them sit on their side, formerly filled with red
wine, while the other two, upright, pot-bellied, are newly made; medium toast
French oak I’m told. A further 16 225-litre wooden barrels gather in the
corner, with another four on order. Someday soon these barrels will hold plenty
of beer that will sleep the sleep of the just.

‘These barrels are a statement of my intent,’ says Tranter,
who made his name as the head brewer at Dark Star, the creator of beers such as
Hophead and Revelation, a former home brewer who started working with Dark
Star’s founder Rob Jones in the 1990s (there’s an irony that Tranter’s current
assistant Tom is also a home brewer — the wheel turns full circle).

‘I was proud of the part I played in what I achieved,’ he
says of his time at Dark Star. ‘It was a real wrench to leave, but one of the
reasons for getting out was that I didn’t want to look back and regret not
doing things. I had an itch I wanted to scratch. I also wanted to do this
brewery properly and didn’t want to sit in a van dropping a nine here and
there. I wanted a decent sized brewery (this is 15 barrels) and everything has
to be good.’

He left Dark Star in the spring, went over to the States and
then having secured the building, undertook the alterations and got hold of the
kit, the first brew was at the end of September. Three cask beers are regularly
brewed: Plateau is a 3.5% pale winsome beer that is juicy and fruity (mandarin,
peach, pineapple, hop sack pungency) and finishes with a dusty, dry bitterness;
Aurora is 5.6% and is, as Tranter insists, ‘a strong pale ale not an IPA’ — it
has a Cointreau-like orange character, a husky dryness that demands another
taste and a slate-like dryness in the finish; finally, there’s the 7% IPA
Devil’s Rest, which is almost red in colour and has a fragrant cherry/cedar
nose (with a hint of amaretto), a nutty, stone-like centre, sensuous citrus and
ferocious dry finish. This is a rugged IPA, Mount Rushmore with stubble
perhaps.

And then we come to time, Tranter’s fifth element, fifth
ingredient, burning passion perhaps. He’s always been interested in what
breweries outside these isles do, there’s a restlessness about his creativity,
which I recall from a trip we made to several small Czech breweries a couple of
years ago. Then I recall the first time I tasted Dark Star’s exciting,
extravagant Tripel, a gorgeous beer that possessed the fatness and ringing,
chiming, jellied fruitiness of some of the tripels I’ve had in Belgium. Then
there’s saison of which he is a devotee.

Burning Sky currently brews two saisons. At the moment there
is Saison l’automne, a beer for this time of the year, complex, dry and spicy,
and a reflection of what is available in the hedgerows of Sussex. For this
beer, Tranter collected a load of rosehips and after steeping them in boiling
water added the juice to the fermenting beer. ‘I love saisons and I love the
countryside,’ he says, ‘this saison’s base recipe will remain the same all the
year round but its seasonal ingredients will change. I had this idea that my
seasonal saisons would reflect the seasons and whatever was in season at the
time would be added to the beer.’ Saison l’hiver will feature hawthorns.

Then there is a Saison à la Provision, which is a different
beast altogether. Though it has the same recipe as l’automne (lager malt,
spelt, wheat, carahell, East Kent Goldings, Saaz, Styrian Goldings and Soriachi
Ace), it’s accordingly amped up to 6.5%, has no rosehips or anything from the
hedgerows but instead Brettanomyces and Lactobacillus are added towards the end
of fermentation. The glass I drunk in the fabulous Snowdrop Inn in Lewes was
hazy orange in colour, with a leathery, lemony, bitter, orange, dry, bracing
character while the large long dry finish reminded me of one of those long
endless runs that I seem to vaguely remember on Ski Sunday. I drunk it with the ferocity of a wolf coming down on the fold — I wouldn’t mind a barrel of this permanently on tap at home. It’s also a magnificent food beer, being a wonderful companion to the Snowdrop’s magnificent battered gurnard and chips.

This would be the last time I drink it this way. On the
following morning when I was at the brewery, Tranter was brewing the Provision
and from now on it would be transferred to one of the 2500-litre oak barrels,
and time would take over for the next two to three months. There will also be a
6% stout that will go into wood and a Flemish Red Ale, which Tranter reckons
will need 18 months in wood.

There is a calm concentration about the way Tranter is going
about his business. He can do the PR with meet the brewer nights and getting
writers to visit his brewery but he’s not going to be using the word awesome
any time soon. He’s a brewer first and foremost, inclined to the creative side
of making beer but hasn’t forgotten that brewing is also a business. ‘Yes I’m
nervous about it all,’ he says, ‘there’s a lot riding on what I am doing — what
if it doesn’t work out, people have been kind, but if it doesn’t work out, what
is there?’

I don’t think he has to worry. On the basis of the beers
I’ve tasted and the skill and invention of the brewer I think Burning Sky is
here to stay — after all it’s got time on its side.

Saturday, 16 November 2013

With the sound of a massive ant army on the march, the grain for the first mash of the day at Burning Sky travels along the tube until it reaches the safety of the mash tun — as Shakespeare might have written if he’d been interested in covering the beer scene of his time, this island of brewing is full of noises, strange sounds and sweet melodies. The clanging of metal, the wheezy breathing of the boiler, the shouts of the brewer and now this a massive ant army on the march .

Monday, 4 November 2013

Saturday night, the dark dark night, somewhere in the countryside outside
Malmedy, pointillist beads of light flickering in the surrounding hills and
fields, while here at the start of a lane that leads down to Brasserie de Bellevaux, fiery torches are held aloft, handed out to initially bemused but
then delighted beer writers, who have just spent two days in Liege judging beer
at the Brussels Beer Challenge (the competition, now in its second year, aims
to be held in a different place every year — I’ll be writing a bit more about it later in the week).

Down the lane we go, The Wicker Man being mentioned time and
time again (as well as Madonna when some wax drips on my hand), with a local
brass band ahead of us leading the way, invoking a wonderful if Laurel &
Hardyesque sense of carnival. It’s joyous, surreal, giggle inducing and above
all fun, which is what is forgotten sometimes about beer. Hey beer is fun.

Into the farm yard we herd, where Bellevaux has grown since
being set up by former chemist Wil Schuwer in 2004, torches still jerking up
and down, while a bonfire crackles, glistening haunches of wild boar slowly
turning on a spit. I’ve had some great beer moments and this is yet another
memorable one.

Across the yard in the brewery, the copper clad vessels
reflect the light, adding more lustre to the evening, while glasses of the
brewery’s bracing Blonde and its bone-dry Black are handed around. Wil’s wife
Carla Berghuis greets us, emotion in her voice as she tells the brewery’s
story, its mantra of localism and good beer stirring and joyful at once amid
the smell of wood smoke and the good natured mood of the judges.

In the brewery, Wil discusses beer and brewing, especially
Bellevaux Black, which appears in 1001 Beers. ‘When I thought of it,’ he says, ‘I thought of a British beer, but
this being Belgium we added some foam. I now like to think of it as a porter.’
It is a beautiful beer, a sleek dark chestnut colour with an autumnal aroma of
berries, a smoothness on the palate punctuated spikes of roast and dryness
before finishing with an appetising dryness. I found it a comfortable and
considerate companion to the wild boar and uplifting when it met the cranberry
sauce I dolloped onto my plate.

The brewery also makes Tom’s Pale Ale, a Brune and a Triple
that at 9% was a perilously addictive beer — dried pineapple, voluptuous
sweetness followed by an ascetic dryness. What’s not to like? And while we ate
a woman with an accordion wandered amongst the diners, adding to the sense of
the occasion (this was not U Fleku with the man in the Corsican bandit’s hand
scowling as he waits for change). Good beer, good food but more than that a
great, hearty, homely, friendly, joyous sense of occasion. If you’re in the
Ardennes look these guys up — I can’t promise the fire parade and the band
though.

Monday, 28 October 2013

Some beers squeeze their way into the house, they’re from
Sharp’s and they do more than make me think about how they taste. First of all,
there’s Equinox, a 3.8% session beer with orange peel in the mix. I’m not
thinking breakfast beer here though, it’s something that takes me into another
space as the nose carries the delicate breeze of orange notes that occur when
you dig your nail into the pith; it’s not a big orange blast, but something
fine, something just there, something shimmering on the far horizon. Alongside
this subtlety, there’s a corporeal sweetness from the barley, both notes
combining to suggest a mythical beast along the lines of orange flavoured
toffee. I would call it a clean nose, in which the constituent parts all
harmonise together, Bloch’s Piano Quintet no 1 perhaps? On the palate the beer
is more forthright with the ghostly oranginess and a honeyed sweetness and a
cracker-like dryness in the finish that is accompanied by a zestful orange
note. A complete beer, a refreshing beer and above a clean beer — where clean
doesn’t mean lacking in flavour, but more that the flavours have a wholeness, a
unity to them. And when the word clean appears on the scene is when I start to
think about the idea of clean vs dirty beers.

Continuing on the theme here is Land Shrimp Pale Ale,
famously made with woodlice, creatures I would squash without thinking about it
when I was younger. This has a good carbonation, a zip and a zap of fizz when
the top is popped. Hazy orange in the glass, fruit gum, orange flavoured, on
the nose — not a big bazooka of aroma, but there it is, to be joined by
pineapple. Mouthfeel is initially creamy, followed by a sprightly dance of
carbonation, a good two-step action. Pineapple, orange and no woodlice — I
don’t really know what to expect; further gulps bring forth an earthiness or is
that the mind playing tricks on me? There is a good appetising dry finish with
bitterness and subtle pepperiness in the background; plus a hint of chalk.
There is still the cleanness of what I come to feel is the signature of Sharp’s
beers.

This then brings me to think about the idea of clean vs
dirty beers. I remember writing once about how Kernel’s beers were dirty and
the better for it and I would say the same with Sharp’s from the clean
perspective. It reminds me of something Alastair Hook said to me years ago
about lager — about how he was trying to have his beers show off the flavours
and aromas of the raw materials he was using. That’s the definition of a great
lager. With the cleanness of the beers of Sharp’s, you also get to smell and
taste the raw materials, but with the ale yeast adding that extra dimension.
Clean vs dirty — it doesn’t have to be divisive.

Friday, 25 October 2013

There’s nary a pop as the bottle top is popped, no hiss, no
gentle pssst as what I would expect the noise the CO2 would make,
eager to escape like a genie from this earthenware style bottle. Has it been
released too young is the thought that burrows its way through my brain?

There is an appley cider sourness to the aroma, which
bridges over to the palate; the tasting notes for the beer say vanilla and
coffee and that is what I would expect from a beer billed as a strong dark
porter — and then I think Brett? However, it’s still and viscous even though
its end of life date is only next summer and the abv is 7.5%. Perhaps it’s
meant to be still, but the stillness means initially that all the flavours hang
separately; a wardrobe of badly picked colours and shaped, nothing that you
would want to wear at the same time. It’s just I would like carbonation to be
the wardrobe mistress.

Those were my first impressions.

As time takes hold, takes me by the hand,
there is a character and a cough and toughness to this beer that really makes
me want to explore it further — it couldn’t any further from Box Steam’s other
beers. A toughened, leathery toffee/treacle character that has pepper in the
background and roast ground coffee beans that have been left for some time to
lessen the freshness of the coffeeness, which is fine as I wasn’t expecting a
big coffee hit; then here they are, the mellow vanilla notes are a nice big hug
from someone close to you. It’s not overly sweet and the Brett is a delightful
surprise but then I wonder if it is deliberate? Definitely Brett and it works
pretty effectively with the vanilla and cocoa notes. It’s an interesting and
exciting beer that nudges me like an over-ignored Tasmanian Tiger eager to go
for a walk. Thank you Box Steam for sending this beer to me — I did think I knew what to expect but I am glad my expectations were confounded. Oh it’s called Evening Star and I think
it’s rather special.

Friday, 11 October 2013

I’m going to be brave and stand up and say my name and after taking a deep breath I am going to say that I like beer mats. Yes that’s right, I like beer mats. I started collecting them as a teenager, though I got rid of my first hoard after splitting up with a girlfriend, but then started again and now have enough to fill about four shoeboxes. I have some of them displayed on my book shelves, while others are in plastic sleeves somewhere in a folder and the rest remain in the boxes.

What do I like about them?

There’s an element of time and travel about them — some represent a visit to a pub (or brewery) in a specific town or country, a memory jogger, a souvenir, a time capsule. I can see an old school Adnams one with the fisherman (and pipe), which was used for Old Ale —this takes me back to my first visit to Southwold on a cold night towards the end of the year in 1989 (that was a good night). The one for Coreff returns me to our son’s first holiday when he was about four months old (oddly enough there’s a photo from that time on the web somewhere — I’ve got a glass of Leffe and a baby is looking at it worriedly). Then there are the mats of beers from breweries that I used to like but are no longer here: as I write I can see ones for Morrells, Devenish, Tolly Cobbold and Brakspear’s on the wall. There are also mat or should that be coasters for American, Polish, Italian, German and Belgian breweries.

However the reason why I have been thinking of beer mats is this little beauty above for Harvey’s in Lewes. I picked it up at the Rake on Wednesday night and I just love it. Its immediate, striking, has a cartoonish quality but is warm as well. There’s an element of self-humour there as well, as Viva Lewes is not a phrase I would usually attribute to Harvey’s, who are one of my favourite breweries. It’s a mat to celebrate their old ale and presumably the imagery refers to Lewes’ bonfire night next month. I love it and it’s like a prediction of a journey yet to be done — I haven’t been to Harvey’s but this is something I will get around to rectifying sooner rather than later. Oh and Pete Brown tells me that the artist who did this glorious beer mat also did the cover for Shakespeare’s Local.

And of course we all know that beer mat collectors call themselves tegestologists’ — I think I’ll pass on that .

Tuesday, 8 October 2013

Bristol Beer Week is coming to its close and from what I
hear it’s been a liver wracking success. Last night I was engaged in a beer and
food match alongside a 1001 Beers signing at Arbor’s fantastic Three Tuns in
the Hotwells area in Bristol. I think it went well, there was good people, good
beer and I was overwhelmed by the brilliant food that Ben at Meat and Breadmatched with the beers.

Here goes. Pork belly cured in Saison Dupont accompanied by celeriac
puree — the beer’s spiciness and carbonation wrapped itself around the meat,
hugged the fat, slapped the puree on the back and insinuated itself into the
spices. A celebration. Brewfist Spaceman with mango salad, Asian spices and peanut: say hello to
the deep orangey hues of this Italian IPA and it’s a greeting as effective as
that between US and Soviet forces when they met on the Elbe in 1945. Cerviche. Bristol
Beer Factory’s Southville Hop was used to cure fresh mackerel and then served
alongside — what a beautiful result it was. The beer brought out the flavour of
the fish, while its hop character of tropical fruit was kept intact. A sensual
otherworldly experience somewhat akin to praying awaited with Ampleforth Abbey
beer and a slice of well-aged Westcombe Cheddar —there was also a rarebit with
the briskness of the beer’s carbonation and its toffee, coffee and dried fruit
notes lapping at the well of creativity. Beavertown Smog Rocket was used to
braise mussels and then served alongside — yes please, while home cured
cucumbers were floured and deep fried as pickle chips before being served with
Lindemann’s Cuvee Rene — an inspired match with the soft, gentle acidity of the
cucumber lifting the vinousness and sherry like flavours of the beer. Oh look,
here comes another triumph: smoked caramel ice cream and peanut brittle served
with Arbor’s silky, earthy, bittersweet Breakfast Stout. If man is 5, the Devil
is 6 and this match is 9 — the beer almost became a component of the dish,
lifted its flavours, acted as a bridge and made the grown men in the room ooh
and aah like babies. To finish: how about Triple Karmeliet with foie gras and
banana chutney? Yes please.

So when in Bristol head to the Three Tuns at lunchtime and
see what Ben at Meat and Bread has to offer (his sarnies are on the bar every
lunchtime). And then on the way to the station pop into BrewDog and say hello —
Bristol is yet another great beer city and I for one look forward to next
year’s Beer Week.

Tuesday, 1 October 2013

Dissonance. It sometimes works in music. Chords bumping into
each; a rhythmic disturbance that somehow works; slow, fast, slow, fast, C#
Minor and G Major played at the same time perhaps, though given that one chord contains C and the other C# it might be stretching things a bit too far. However,
I’m also thinking of John Coltrane, whose work I don’t know much beyond a Love
Supreme, but I remember enjoying it years ago. The Jesus & Mary Chain could
do a nice riff in dissonance as well — the Beach Boys (or the Monkees) filtered through Lou Reed Metal
Machine Music perhaps? Even in Elgar’s transcription of JS Bach’s Fantasia in C
minor there’s a nice line in creative dissonance when it seems like the
orchestra is starting to slow down and fall apart but something happens to keep
it all together and the music moves to new heights of beauty.

And what this has to do with beer? The other night I opened
the bottle of Meantime’s Cali-Belgian IPA that I had been sent. Described as a
golden Californian-style IPA given a Belgian twist, I found it an intriguingly
dissonant beer with the Belgian yeast giving it a bright and spicy character,
while the IPA side of things brought forward a concentration of grapefruit, orange peel and fresh mango, though it wasn’t an easy-going fruitiness. It was a fascinating beer and one that really deserved to have some time spent with it. It made me think and with each sip I loved the
beer more. And as I drank it I thought that if Californian-style IPA was rock,
then Cali-Belgian IPA was most definitely jazz and that is when I started
thinking about dissonance.

There’s a wildness, a flutter of different harmonies, an
itch developed to explore more, a feeling that such a beer is not an easy
conquest, but something to be contemplated, not instantly understood. And it
was then that I thought about jazz, a form of music that I’ve never been too
fond of though what I’ve heard from Coltrane and Miles Davis has always
intrigued me. That’s the same thing with this beer — it intrigues me, it makes
me think and best of all it revives what I sometimes worry is a palate being
jaded by too many IPAs, that everyone and their mother nowadays makes. I loved
it but if you want some best be quick as it’s part of the Brewers’ Collection,
a monthly beer from Meantime. Next time around there’s an Imperial Pilsner , which I really hope I can try. That won’t be dissonant — contrapuntal
perhaps?

Thursday, 26 September 2013

Books books books. Having worked in journalism and
publishing for more years than I care to remember I know that autumn is a key
time for getting books out. Christmas is around the corner, but we’re not caught in
its headlights yet so there’s plenty of time to get people prepared to buy
books throughout the next three months. So this autumn, there seems to be a torrent of beer (and cider) books coming out: we’ve had Roger Protz’s 300 More Beers, and
now there’s Ben McFarland’s Boutique Beer, while Jane Peyton has been really
busy with School of Booze and Beer O’Clock; having seen some PDFs of the pages
back in the summer I’m also looking forward to Pete Brown’s World’s Best Cider,
written in conjunction with Somerset Levels snapper Bill Bradshaw;
there’s also Stephen Beaumont and Tim Webb’s Pocket Beer Book, a conscious echo
of Michael Jackson’s similar publications during the 1990s and beyond perhaps? I’ve probably forgotten someone, but it’s time I blew my own trumpet. My first
update of 1001 Beers is also out and it features 90 new beers that have been
written by Tim Hampson, Evan Rail, Greg Barbera, Martyn Cornell, Pete Brown,
Zak Avery and Joe Stange. The beers include ones from Kernel, Tiny Rebel,
Beavertown, Brewfist, 8-Wired, Jack’s Abby (a particular favourite of mine),
Buxton, Oakham, Vivat, Ska, Heavy Seas, Sierra Nevada (Narwhal), Evil Twin,
Oskar Blues, Matuska, Nomad and Keserü. I’m
really pleased with the selection and wish it could have been double or even
triple — which says how much the beer world has changed in the last three
years. While I’m on the podium can I also bring to your attention to Tim Hampson’s
World Beer, into which I was drafted as an author along with Stan Hieronymous
and Sylvia Kopp earlier on in the year. And further more can I bring your by now lack of attention to the beer tasting and extemporisation I shall be doing at the Three
Tuns during the wonderful Bristol Beer Week on Monday October 7,
followed by a Rake bar event with Hardknott Brewery on Wednesday October 9; then it’s Hook Norton on Friday October 18 and finally there’s something planned with Meantime
in November — it’s like being in a band again, though the furthest we got from Cambridge was Peterborough.

Wednesday, 18 September 2013

The gentlest wash of iodine takes itself into the softly sour arms of
rhubarb serenaded by a pleasingly high note of Brett and all is well as this
aromatic triumvirate wishes everyone the very best before they vanish into the
gloaming for a dirty weekend. Ilkley’s Speyside Siberia is 8.8%, which makes it all the more remarkable that this jigsaw of a complex beer has such a slinky, insistently
pleasurable drinkability. It’s soft in its mouthfeel and sour in the way it
rocks and reels through the senses, thrumming away on the palate with a lovely
loose and elegant sense of its own beauty (think something kinky like dry
champagne minus the bubbles spending its time romancing an eclectically
inclined Belgian blonde and you might be somewhere close). Sour can be sometime
dour in the way it can turn seconds on the palate into hours, but with this
ramped up, well-wooded version of their rhubarb-infused saison that Ilkley made
in combination with Imbibe Educator of the Year Melissa Cole the generous rush of flavour and brewing audacity makes me sad that only
700 bottles were made. I am now in Siberia for the rest of my life, with little
hope of getting there.

Saturday, 14 September 2013

Craft beer café it says and in the middle of the old town of
Malaga here is Cervecería Arte&Sana. Here for a couple of days on a travel feature and was pleased to find this place recommended to me. Unlike other ‘craft beer bars’ I’ve found in
the unlikeliest places recently (Rimini, Bologna) this is actually easy to discover as it is on a busy Plaza in old Malaga (cheaper rents than in Italy perhaps?).
I don’t expect much from these sorts of places: good beer, expertly poured and
a decent ambience. Oh and some food if you want.

So there I am on a Friday evening in Malaga, in a very
modern bar, with a black and white theme in the tables and chairs, but a
stainless steel serving thing and a wall with a cupboard filled with loads of —
dare I say it — craft beers from across the world (lots of Mikkeller). I like
the place — in a funny sort of way it reminded me of Moeder Lambic (the second
one), with its light and airy ambience, a none too precious attitude to beer with
also a great beer list, of the sort you wouldn’t expect to find in Madrid
never mind in the south of Spain.

There was a blackboard at the end of the bar with the draft
beers’ names up there — I’ve come all this way and there is Thornbridge and
BrewDog, but there’s also some Danish beer plus the best example of a Spanish
c-word beer I have had for a long time. Dougall’s 942 Pale Ale is a fragrant
(as in peach and orange ripe skins frotting each other until the cows come
home) beauty of a beer with a weighty mouth feel and a dancing almost Sufi-like
whirl of refreshment through the whole of the gulp. Thornbridge’s St Petersburg
is a blast.

And as I watch a drunk American woman trying to keep it to
together through her glass of Dead Pony Club, while lads with beards order
Green Flash barley wine alongside Paulaner Weiss, I am struck by this thought:
are craft beer bars the Irish bars of the future (a thought occasioned by the
sight of a nearby Irish bar — Morrissey’s, for a moment I thought it was perhaps an ironic English bar celebrating Manchester misery) and mightn’t it not be a good thing?